Introducing The Meta Cognitive Mind

A guide for insomniacs in gaining mastery over how we think and feel in a world driven to distraction

We’ve spent considerable time examining how the self-help industry—and other influencers—aim at everyone from insomniacs (as we discussed in the insomnia chat Substack) to vulnerable groups and the general public. We’ve built a framework—and are continuously refining it alongside apps—to spot undue influence in digital media. But what about face-to-face settings? How often are we swayed when watching TV, chatting with friends, negotiating with colleagues or making major purchases—like a car or a house—without even realizing it? How can we be sure our choices are well-reasoned, free from coercion or manipulation? And even when they are, how do we guard against buyer’s remorse? How often are we being influenced by positive or negative experiences from the past that hijack our thinking, influencing us in ways we hardly register, creating emotional neurological addiction to chemical imbalances they cause? How often do we find ourselves caught up in the future, worrying about tomorrow, about conversations we are yet to have that in hindsight seldom appear? And is there any benefit to focusing on the present and thinking about not thinking?

In The Meta Cognitive Mind, I’ll share practical guidance, training, tips and lessons drawn from over twenty years in sales, marketing and the art of persuasion—bolstered by insights from behavioural science, meditation, hypnosis and NLP, plus my own life experiences. This isn’t a manual on spotting liars, narcissists or sociopaths—there are plenty of dubious experts online peddling that angle. Instead, through this free Substack, my goal is to arm you with the tools you need to think clearly and decide wisely, no matter how others around you may try to influence you. Or how your bodily addictions to unconscious fears and desires, shape your thinking, feeling and conscious experience.

Even with my background, this is as much a learning journey for me as it is for you. I, too, fall prey to hasty decisions, get baited into arguments, and sometimes find my thinking muddled. Writing and sharing these ideas helps me clarify my own mind just as much as it helps yours.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t therapy. Think of it as mind-coaching or training. If you need to work through past traumas or deep-seated issues, please seek a licensed psychotherapist—something I’m not.

You might find it ironic that I’m offering a self-help guide while critiquing the self-help industry. I’m not against self-help itself—that well-stocked section in any good bookstore is proof of its value. My target is with that focus are the self-styled “gurus” who demand fanatical loyalty, hawk unverified expensive courses, and promise mastery of life. My approach is simpler: I unpack useful tools and techniques, you test what works, discard the rest, and move on—no lifetime subscriptions, no constant upsells, no false claims of complete enlightenment. If you wish to buy me a coffee then great, I like it a lot, if not that’s cool also.

The internet would have you believe you need a side hustle, a personal brand, and a five-year plan just to justify your existence. You don’t. You’re already worthy of a good life. I ran the side hustle—I know what it costs, and in my case it cost me a marriage. I came out the other side, and I’m better for it, but the lesson wasn’t about hustle or productivity. It was about focus—specifically, what we choose to focus on and why. That question sits at the heart of meta cognition: examining not just what we think, but how and why we think it, how we speak to ourselves, and what that internal dialogue does to us psychologically, neurologically, and physically—and in turn, how it shapes everything around us.

My hope is that you’ll join me on this path, share your own insights in the comments, and maybe even start your own Substack to explore what you’ve learned from your own journey. Together, we can nurture truly meta-cognitive minds—free thinkers who recognise and resist undue influence, coercion and manipulation. If you’re ready to dive into Thinking about Thinking—and how it’s shaped—come along for the journey.

For me, the meta-cognitive training process breaks down like this:

Meditation. Then mindfulness—not silencing my thoughts so much as understanding them. Noticing whether I’m speaking to myself kindly or harshly, and becoming aware of the physical, chemical signatures those thoughts leave in the body: the tightening, the release, the residue of whatever emotion they’ve stirred up.

From there, I use that mindful awareness to examine the language I’m actually using—mapping it for what NLP calls meta-programs, unpicking the metaphors, metonyms and similes I reach for instinctively, and asking what those habitual figures of speech might reveal about my unconscious drives and desires.

Then I use NLP itself to remap and reprogram those patterns—and embed the new ones through hypnosis and manifestation work.

Some of that may sound like woo-woo. That’s fine. Test it, look into it, or don’t—it works for me. I’d love to tell you it’s all part of a crisp daily morning routine. It isn’t. Realistically I get ten to twenty minutes of some combination of the above on any given day; doing all of it properly takes hours, which most of us don’t have. Slow thinking is something I’m still working on myself.

The reason I’m laying this out now, upfront, is simple: I’m not selling anything, so there’s no reason to make you wait for the reveal. If any of this is useful to you today, why hold it back? As we go, I’ll unpack each of these steps in more depth, bring in some supporting theory—and some counter-theory—and draw on what behavioural economics, behavioural psychology and psychoanalytic thinking can teach us about how we make decisions. The goal throughout is the same: to help make our thinking and decision-making as genuinely autonomous as possible.